Monthly Archives: October 2016

In the year 2000, in the middle of the “Hanging Chad” disaster in Florida, I was in a car with three New York attorneys, two Democrats and one Republican. Obviously the nightmare between George “Dubya” Bush and Al “Internet” Gore was the subject of discussion. When a lull came in the raucous debate, I told them that the only institution that could settle this situation was the US Supreme Court, because no other mechanism or institution in the country had proper authority in the matter. They laughed at me.

On 9 December 2000 the US Supreme Court duly halted the Florida recount, thereby giving the US Presidency to George Bush. I received a phone call from the three attorneys together, and they told me that “We’ll be sure to check with you next time the US is in a Constitutional crisis”.

Today is just on sixteen years later, and I am hereby giving the United States fair warning that it is headed for another constitutional crisis. I am a student of History, South Africa, and the United States. For the largest part of the Obama term, the US has been headed in the direction of South Africa, which is now flirting with Failed State/Banana Republic status with a corrupt president, Jacob Zuma, and a government with near zero regard for the law.

The events around Hillary Clinton over the past few months should be of concern to every thinking American. As of 1pm Eastern Standard Time today, the investigation of Clinton’s e-mail scandal has been reopened by the FBI. The same FBI is already under severe criticism for the highly suspect investigation earlier conducted into Hillary’s Server Mess. On the basis of that investigation FBI Director Comey essentially declared Hillary (below) to be as guilty as all sin, but that he would not recommend prosecuting her. Read THISwell laid out explanation of the situation.

That illogical and self-contradictory announcement destroyed the faith of thinking people in the FBI. In faraway South Africa, some years before, the Parliament controlled by the ANC Party voted to shut down the South African equivalent of the FBI; this because most of those members were under investigation by said “FBI”. This present author does not see much difference between the two situations. When one adds secret meetingsbetween Hillary’s husband and the boss of the FBI director shortly before, then the whole thing stinks just as badly as in South Africa. It would seem the United States is hell-bent on becoming an African Banana Republic. So, if the United States wishes to avoid rotting itself into the same state as South Africa, very clear action needs to be taken here. Let me explain:

The FBI, having messed up the earlier investigation and waived indictment of Hillary, is in a tizzy, trying to rescue its tarnished image as the foremost investigative body on earth. Many good FBI investigators are profoundly upset at their boss Comey’s self-contradictory July announcement. On top of this, it has become clear that the FBI man who led the investigation is married to a lady who recieved a mountain of moneyfrom a group for whom Hillary had raised funding. It has also been revealed that various parties around Hillary had received FBI promises to not prosecute them in return for cooperation. All these procedural oddities have angered the Republican Party with good reason. This must have played a role in Comey (below) now treading super-carefully.

BUT, if, after having dented Hillary’s campaign eleven days before the election, the FBI does NOT indict her, then, if she loses the election, half the nation will cry foul, accuse the FBI of sinking her campaign, and the FBI will never recover its apolitical status. All respect for the FBI’s parent, the Justice Department, will die along with this. Therewith the Rule of Law in the US will be called into question. This is serious stuff, and it will affect the rest of the world, because constitutional instability in the US is bad for the planet.

There is now only one way forward, and that is for the Justice Department to do what it should have done before Hillary tried to corrupt the FBI, namely appoint a Special Prosecutor as for Nixon in the 1970s and/or a Grand Jury. Ideally that Special Prosecutor would be approved by the present Congress. That is the only solution that can cross right through the election without damaging the core institutions of the nation itself. The problem here plainly arose because Comey took upon himself the role of a Grand Jury in July. Any reasonable human being would find it strange that a Grand Jury was instituted to decide whether officer Darren Wilson should be prosecuted in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, but no Grand Jury (or Special Independent Prosecutor) was needed to decide on Hillary’s alleged transgressions.

Despite the above, the US may still face the horror of having its new president bundled from office before her seat in the White House is even hot. But that is better than the mayhem that would result from the “Hillary not indicted but loses election” disaster.

Of course, what would have been infinitely better, would have been for the Democratic Party to have NOT nominated a candidate with such a long history of suspect conduct. There is not a waking American that can tell me that he or she did not know there was a problem. I know, because many Democrats told me so. One Democrat told me “I’d as soon slit my own wrist as vote for that woman.”

Maybe it is true that Donald Trump is rubbing his hands together gleefully, but there truly are matters of greater import than the selection of the president, and the faith of the nation in the Rule of Law is such a matter.

Now and then one comes across an article that addresses a basic truth or a basic distinction. The article by Keith Matthee in The Conversation of 19 October 2016 is exactly such a piece. Matthee is Senior Counsel and has served as High Court judge. At present he is doing a Theology PhD at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Even if I do not agree with Matthee on some of the details raised—an example being the nebulous “thousands murdered by the forces of the National Party“— he vividly juxtaposes the Violence of Mandela to the Peace of Martin Luther King Jr.

It is of profound importance that thinking human beings the world over should understand this basic difference between Mandela and King.

Many years ago, when I was 12 years old, I spent six weeks with my cousin in Colesberg in the dry interior of South Africa. One day, we went hunting for lizards on the rocky hill behind the Dutch Reformed church. Soon enough I saw the tail of a suspect disappear under a rock. I rushed forward and grabbed the little guy by the tail. I dug after it while holding the tail. And that is when it doubled back over my arm from under the rock in the form of a snake. I had a snake by the tail. Sometimes little lizards can turn into very big snakes indeed.

You ask what that story has to do with the unmarked dirt road turnoff in the middle of nowhere above? It looks much like the dry interior of South Africa. Well, keep reading, and all will become clear, and it will get to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the US Presidential election, and Vladimir Putin.

Hillary and the Snake

The story about the snake came to mind again after the US Vice-Presidential debate on 4 October 2016, when young Eric Trump (below), son of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, was interviewed by three CNN hosts. The three “Clinton National Network” people badgered him about his father’s taxes and possible business interests in Russia. After roundly rejecting any suggestion that his father had assets or debts in Russia, the young man deftly turned the focus to what I have been waiting for for a very long time. He raised the matter (click on the photo) of Hillary Clinton and the payment of millions received by the Clinton Foundation from businessmen with links to Vladimir Putin. Of course, CNN ignored his question. How else? That is why they are the “Clinton National Network”.

If Donald Trump knows what he is doing, then this little lizard under the rock can turn into a very big snake indeed for Hillary Clinton. Trump just has to present a clear picture of the snake, because he already knows where the rock is that the snake is hiding under. If Americans were to actually understand the picture, they would be outraged against the infamous “Clinton Machine” and its abuse of its influence in Washington. One might well ask whether the influence of a future US Presidency has been put up for sale internationally by the Clintons.

The middle of nowhere

The picture below shows a satellite view of a mine at the end of a long dirt road in the area of the opening image of this article. That mine is owned by an organization responsible for nuclear weapons. “So what?“, you ask. Well, that organization is controlled by Vladimir Putin. There is nothing particularly odd about that either, since Russia has many mines. This is fine, until one realizes that the mine is situated some distance off the Black-and-Yellow Road.

OK, so you don’t know where that is. Well, it is not in Russia, nor in South Africa, but in the middle of nowhere southwest of Gillette in Wyoming, near where I took the opening image in 2005. The Yellow and Black Road is an old time highway in United States, now largely forgotten. The operation is known as the Willow Creek Mine and is located on the Christensen Ranch on an unmarked turnoff, just like the one in the picture. The mine is a major uranium source.

Now let us go to South Africa and the Manhattan Project that gave the United States the nuclear bomb.

South africa and Uranium One

Uranium One is a uranium mining company with headquarters in Toronto, Canada. It was created from, among other building blocks, the South African Aflease Gold under Neal J. Froneman (left), who has a Bachelor’s degree from Wits University in Johannesburg. In English, his name is pronounced “Froh – nuh -munn”. His whole career has been in South African mining.

Uranium occurs naturally as a trace metal along with gold in South Africa. This is why the country suppliedsome of the uranium that was used in the Manhattan Project. South Africa has a long history in uranium production and Aflease also produced uranium. The company merged with Canadian-listed Southern Cross Resources on 15 September 2005 to create SXRUranium One with Froneman as CEO.

There is no problem with any of this. Froneman is a mining man with high international standing. Intelligent investor money tends to follow him.

Enter Bill Clinton

In 2007, Froneman’s Uranium One acquired a controlling interest in UrAsia Energy, a company owned by Vancouver based Clinton Foundation donor, Frank Giustra. Canadian mining magnate, Ian Telfer, originally the UrAsia chairman, stayed on as non-executive chairman of Uranium One with Neal Froneman as CEO. Giustra had made his name via his Lion’s Gate Entertainment movie company. One cannot really move around near our home without running into Lion’s Gate operations. Giustra had since sold that venture, and was now interested in mining.

In the aftermath of the visit, UrAsia had acquired major uranium holdings in Kazakhstan and a few months later Bill Clinton had been rewarded with a $31.3M donation from Giustra to his Clinton Foundation. Now, in 2007, Uranium One controlled much of the uranium reserves of Kazakhstan and Clinton had in effect “blessed” an oppressive master in president Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Froneman points the way

Uranium One by now had started buying up major tranches of uranium assets in the United States. A report dated 4 June 2007 stated that Uranium One was acquiring or had acquired uranium assets in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Oregon. Neal Froneman announced that his latest acquisition in the United States would,

…create a powerhouse in the United States uranium sector with the potential to become the domestic supplier of choice for US utilities.

Enter Vladimir Putin

A few moths later, in December 2007, Vladimir Putin of Russia signed into law an act of the Russian Parliament by which the old Ministry of Nuclear Engineering and Industry of the USSR was recast as a Russian State Corporation. It was given the name Rosatom. The Ministry already had responsibility for, among other things, Russian nuclear weapons. Most conveniently, it was also responsible for nuclear power generation. It certainly seems to build a lot of reactors (below). Rosatom has 44 under construction, 36 of them outside Russia. (See page 40 of the report in the link)

Interesting timing on Putin’s part, eh?

Exit Froneman

In February 2008, Neal Froneman, an exceptional business leader, left Uranium One to focus on the company Gold One. That operation is funded by “Red” Chinese money and its leadership has a number of mainland China individuals as directors. The ANC government of South Africa, with its multitude of Communist Party members, has since become infatuated with Communist China, seeing it as an example for South Africa. The thought is terrifying, to say the least.

This is what happens when the US ignores consequences in places where it interferes politically, such as Iraq and Libya, and of course South Africa. The country was given on a silver platter to the Communist dominated ANC on Bill Clinton’s watch in 1994, “to the sound of heavenly violins and angel song”. All one had to do was mumble the word “Mandela” and starstruck American Liberals would veritably “swoon”. Now it is a complete mess with a corrupt animist and bigamist president and a tourist industry on the side to woo gullible rich Westerners who do not ask questions.

On January 29, 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of US ex-president Bill Clinton, assumed office as the 67th United States Secretary of State. One of her “initiatives” was the so-called “Russian reset”, a doomed attempt to improve relations with Russia. The infantile handing (left) of a physical “reset button” to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has come to symbolize this policy disaster. It bore the English word “Reset”, but the Cyrillic translation on the button was botched and turned out to mean “Overload”.

As the saying goes, “You can’t make up this stuff“. That was about as ignorant as Britain’s Gordon Brown handing Obama, a man with zero slave ancestry, a piece of wood from a 19th century British anti-slaving ship. It is much more likely that Obama’s ancestors were, in fact, slavers themselves.

In June 2009, Rosatom bought 17% of Uranium One. However, this was hardly in keeping with Russia’s appetite for nuclear materials. Rosatom wanted a controlling share in Uranium One. The problem was, Hillary Clinton’s State Department would have to approve Putin’s uranium mining acquisition dreams. And Hillary served on the relevant Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

And this was when the REAL fun started.

Money greases all wheels

Meanwhile, “back at the (Wyoming) ranch”, in August 2009, Uranium One bought Malco, which owned several uranium resources in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming, including the major Willow Creek operation described above. By now Uranium One had command of some 20% of US uranium resources.

According to the New York Times, Uranium One and former UrAsia investors made $8.65 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010. Uranium One investors would stand to profit on a deal with Rosatom.

On 9 June 2010 World Nuclear News announced that Rosatom and Uranium One had signed an agreement that would give Rosatom a 51% controlling share in Uranium One. The agreement was subject to clearance by the US Committee on Foreign Investment; Hillary’s Committee.

A mere ten days later, on 29 June 2010, Bill Clinton received a fee of $500,000 for a speech to Renaissance Capital, a Moscow bank with ties to the Kremlin. According to the Wall Street Journal, Clinton received a personal thank you call from (then) Prime Minister Putin.

In October 2010 Hillary’s Committee on Foreign Investment approved the majority shareholding by Putin’s Rosatom. Canadian Tax records reportedly show that Telfer gave the Clinton Foundation $2.4 million more from 2009 to 2012. Additional millions in donations were reportedly given around this time by other people with ties to Uranium One.

Somehow the picture above of Bill Clinton meeting with Putin that year seems to sum up the situation perfectly. The man on the left appears to be having fun while the man on the right is sizing him up as a good chess master should.

The Chess Game

Putin’s final chess move came on 14 January 2013 when World Nuclear News reported that Rosatom planned to acquire the remaining shares of Uranium One and to delist it, contrary to the original arrangement with the US State Department. That meant total control for Putin over the company without the “pesky interference” of any public shareholders. The game was complete. Putin had won….. yet again.

Hillary left office on 1 February, 2013 at the end of Obama’s first term, and Putin now controls one in every five tons of uranium reserves in the United States. Clever, eh? I wonder if Bill Clinton is still laughing.

Now, about that “snake under the rock”…… will Trump use it?

And in South Africa?

Rosatom is angling to build up to ten reactors in South Africa for the country’s president, Jacob Zuma. By now every sentient being in South Africa believes that it is nothing more than yet another scam by Zuma to siphon off 10% of all taxpayer money paid for such reactors and to squirrel that money away in the coffers of his ANC party.

And in Russia?

And, as ordinary South Africans suffer in a country that has been turned into a joke by Zuma, and Americans focus on childish nonsense, Rosatom head, Sergey Kiriyenko, meets regularly with his boss (below), as shown by none other than the Kremlin website.

This very week Kiriyenko was promoted to the position of First Deputy Head of the Presidential Office of the Federation of Russia.

I wonder whether American voters are getting the picture yet? They seriously need to come to grips with their position in the world, instead of focusing on Donald Trump’s vulgar lockerroom talk from ten years ago.

One cannot but take one’s hat off to Putin. But it would be most helpful if the West had a leader to match his intellect, insight, and ability. I don’t care whether the candidate leader secretly practised loutish locker room talk eleven years ago. As long as he shows respect for the Office the President of the United States, his wife can sort him out if she is worth her salt.